I'm an American journalist traveling way outside my comfort zone, living for half a year in Tanzania and trying to cast a fresh pair of eyes on the complexities of development in one of the poorest places in the world.

Theme by nostrich.

9th April 2010

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On Saturday afternoon we took a taxi to the Genocide Memorial, on a hillside overlooking the central part of the city, opened on the 10th anniversary in 2004. It is really Kigali’s only genuine tourist attraction, and my fear was it would be diminished by clichés and historical posturing. In fact, it was neither of those things. It is simple, educational, elegant and dignified. The outer portion is a circle that gives a useful if simplified macro-account of the confusing events that led up to the killings. The center of the museum is focused entirely on humanizing the victims. There is a room full of photographs of perhaps just a few hundred of the dead, and another of some of their clothes, and finally one with actual skulls and bones. A quarter of a million people are buried in the surrounding gardens overlooking the Kigali skyline. To my surprise, the entire second floor of the museum is given over to other genocides — the Holocaust in Europe, Cambodia, Armenia, Bosnia and others. Rwanda could certainly be excused for thinking it didn’t have sorrow to spare for other parts of the world. Yet the museum seems determined to put the genocide in the larger context of a phenomenon that is by no means limited to “dark“ and “tribal” Africa — it is an evil of which people from every corner of the earth have proved capable.

On Saturday afternoon we took a taxi to the Genocide Memorial, on a hillside overlooking the central part of the city, opened on the 10th anniversary in 2004. It is really Kigali’s only genuine tourist attraction, and my fear was it would be diminished by clichés and historical posturing. In fact, it was neither of those things. It is simple, educational, elegant and dignified. The outer portion is a circle that gives a useful if simplified macro-account of the confusing events that led up to the killings. The center of the museum is focused entirely on humanizing the victims. There is a room full of photographs of perhaps just a few hundred of the dead, and another of some of their clothes, and finally one with actual skulls and bones. A quarter of a million people are buried in the surrounding gardens overlooking the Kigali skyline. To my surprise, the entire second floor of the museum is given over to other genocides — the Holocaust in Europe, Cambodia, Armenia, Bosnia and others. Rwanda could certainly be excused for thinking it didn’t have sorrow to spare for other parts of the world. Yet the museum seems determined to put the genocide in the larger context of a phenomenon that is by no means limited to “dark“ and “tribal” Africa — it is an evil of which people from every corner of the earth have proved capable.

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